High School · Grade 11 · Ages 16–17
The Price of Time, Risk and Trust
Bonds, yields and markets · 10 sessions × 50 min
The flagship high-school unit teaches the market that prices every promise. A bond is a promise to pay; its price is what the market thinks that promise is worth. Because the promise is fixed, price and yield move in opposite directions — and students derive that rule themselves, session three, before anyone states it. The derivation is the gate for the whole unit.
The year in depth
Ten 50-minute sessions climb from bond anatomy (issuer, principal, coupon, maturity — with the national instruments named from the start) to the yield curve, which students plot by hand from real, current data: the short end reading policy expectations, the long end reading inflation and trust. They read the spread between two governments' bonds — explicitly not a ranking of national worth — and follow the full nine-link chain from a central-bank decision to a household's loan payment.
The capstone is a 40-minute written task: Read This Week's Market. Students explain, in plain language, what the actual current curve and spreads say — and what they cannot say. The 20-mark rubric awards marks for naming the limits of the data. Forecasting forfeits them. That discipline is the product.
What your students learn
- Explain what a bond is, who issues them and why — using the real national instruments
- Derive, not memorise, why bond prices fall when rates rise
- Plot a real yield curve by hand and read both ends of it
- Interpret the spread between two countries' bonds without moralising it
- Trace a central-bank decision through nine links into a household budget
- Write about live market data with disciplined honesty about its limits
For the teacher
Complete teacher guide: ten session plans with formative gates, bond-anatomy cards, yield-curve plotting grids, and the capstone with full 20-mark rubric. Teachers pull live official data the week of teaching — the materials are built for it.